Media – Page 15 – More Zonkyness

Snow and Pavements in the UK

Jan 102010

I dare say everyone in the UK is familiar with this problem – pavements that after a big snow fall end up coated in a thin (or thick) sheet of white ice. It varies in slipperiness from “quite” to “you’re going down”, and is very tiring to walk on because of the strain of making sure you have a good grip before taking the next step.

Apparently in the dim and distant past – before the winter of 1962/1963 (which was a biggie if anyone is wondering), it was common for everyone to clear the pavement in front of their house. Now there’s still a few who do it today, or at least there are a few who eventually get around to it after a few days – suggestion: if you’re going to clear your pavement, do it early before it ends up as ice, it will be a lot easier!

But the vast majority of pavements do not get any kind of treatment until the council gets around to them. We could be all pathetic and whinge about how the council is not doing its job properly and do nothing else. Or we could do something sensible – like clear our pavements ourselves.

But what about all those dire warnings that clearing your pavement could make you liable for being sued when someone takes a tumble ? It is rumoured that this is why people stopped clearing their pavements after 1962/1963, after someone did sue. Well it’s a load of rancid rhinoceros dung :-

BBC News (the journalist says “possibly”; the solicitor says “It would be quite difficult to prove and quite difficult to proceed with a claim.”

There’s plenty of other articles out there saying that you might be sued for clearing the pavement outside your home; but you can be sued for popping out of the house and accidentally knocking over someone in your rush. The fault is not with the law (or with clearing pavements), but with morons who sue at the drop of a hat and at the sniff of a lucrative payout.

We could do with a law saying that those responsible for falls on icy pavements are a) the person who fell (whatever happened to personal responsibility anyway?) and b) the weather (or if you want a person to blame, start believing in one of those god people).

In the absence of such a law it is worth remembering that :-

You are exceptionally unlikely to be sued.
You can always counter-sue the moron for being an anti-social moron (well you can try).
You could always clear half of the pavement so people have a choice of whether to use an untreated surface or a treated surface.
You could always have a lottery for your street so you get to clear the pavement in front of a random house, and destroy the results afterwards. When the householder is sued they can legitimately claim “it wasn’t me wot done it”, and if you destroy the results of the lottery, and carefully forget who did what, the “culprit” won’t be found. Incidentally this also solves the problem of those who can’t or won’t help – those who volunteer get two or three houses to do, and the whole street gets cleared.

Going back a bit, the responsibility for falling rests with the person who slips and falls. It may be harsh, but so is life. It is perfectly possible to arrange for adequate footwear (and straight after this blog is posted, I’ll be buying online something equivalent to crampons). Blaming someone else for your tumble is the sort of behaviour that should bring howls of derision and a few rotten vegetables.

Similarly blaming “the council” for not sorting out the pavements is a little unfair – whilst the council may grit pavements when it is convenient for them to do so, their main responsibility is to ensure that food can get to the shops. In unusually harsh weather (which we have had just now), the council simply isn’t going to be able to get around to the “nice to haves”.

Part of the problem is the possibility of legal liability which the media does it’s unfortunate best to promote – not intentionally perhaps. But by mentioning it whenever the subject of clearing pavements comes up. Usually in a context that on the surface allows for the possibility that liability is ridiculous, but with an undercurrent that re-enforced the myth that clearing pavements could lead to legal trouble.

Is it too much to ask that the media leave this subject alone as much as possible ?

And lastly, lets ignore the possibility of being sued and just clear the pavements.

The Future Of Printed Newspapers

Computing, Media No Responses »

Dec 282009

There seems to be an impression amongst fans of digital media that printed newspapers are on the slow decline on the way to oblivion, and they could well be right. Without some radical changes, printed newspapers could be going the way of the town crier – around only as a historical oddity.

But what about radical change ? There are certainly possibilities there. The key is to look at the weaknesses of digital news :-

Authority. Whilst some digital media news sources have some credibility, much of the time when you bump across some random blogger (like me!), you will have no idea on how credible they are – do they know what they are talking about ? I certainly don’t!
Location. There are zillions (well a large number anyway) of places you can find digital news and it can take time to look for the news you are interested in. That is fine for a number of specialised areas – for instance my job includes an unwritten requirement to keep up to speed with what is happening in the IT industry, so I’ll spend a few hours a week searching. But for something less important to me – such as general European news, I’ll pass.
Photography. Funnily enough given the quality of photo printing in most newspapers, this actually a weakness of digital news – whilst they all do photographs, they don’t do them well. Some of the most dramatic moments in history have had their stories told in newspapers with just a photo printed large. This does not happen often, but when it does it is a very powerful way of telling a news story (or starting off the story).
You can’t read digital media in the bath. In the past, Sundays would often include a period of an hour or two sitting quietly reading the newspaper; whilst we can do that on the computer screen, this is rarely as relaxing as reading in the bath, at a quiet spot in the garden (or the local park), etc.

But what are the weaknesses of the printed newspaper ? Here we also have many :-

You pay for the whole paper. Out of an ordinary newspaper, I am probably interested in at most 50% of it, and it seems rather irritating paying for that sports journalist who puts in some long story about a hockey tournament that I have never heard of, do not care about, and will not take the time to read even if you pay me for it. On the other hand, I might be interested in some random articles on things I would otherwise not read – for instance I am completely uninterested in car reviews, but there has been a recent review of a car “made” by Top Gear that I wouldn’t mind reading (for humour if nothing else).
If you are lucky the newspaper you buy was put together by an editor whose interests closely match your own. Far more likely however is that there are news stories that did not get in (because you have “oddball” interests) because they are not seen as popular. I want to see news stories on what is happening in Europe, and local interest stories for Portsmouth, Winchester, Bangkok, and Sangüesa – a rather eclectic set of locations it may seem, but what they really are is individual.
The quality of news photograph prints needs to be improved on. If you can print fashion photographs in a supplement properly why cannot the news stories also be printed properly ? Maybe that would cost more but I for one would be willing to pay extra for it.
Some people want a daily newspaper and some want a weekly one. Actually some of us probably want a newspaper on some Sundays.

What we are looking at here is a newspaper suited to the individual requirements. Conventional newspaper printing and distribution won’t cope with that, but that does not mean it is impossible to provide. After all we have printing on demand for books, so why not newspapers ?

What I envisage is a web site where you start off by choosing something very conventional … “I want a copy of the Sunday Times delivered every Sunday”. From this unpromising start (and a start that is probably more expensive than the current way of getting the Sunday Times), you can add customisations :-

Print on quality paper for extra cost.
Remove any articles relating to Sport.
Add articles relating to this set of locations.
Add articles relating to IT, astrophysics, and archaeology.
Reset the formatting to use body text font as “Liberation Serif” at 12 points, headlines as “Verdana” at 14 points, and make the pages four columns wide.

From there, you could add additional customisations to the point where the newspaper has little or no relation to the real world “Sunday Times”. Whilst the default preference would be to pay for a printed copy, you could opt for downloading a PDF (or any other suitable eBook format) at a cheaper cost if you wished.

I am sure that if some newspaper magnate were to read this, they would think “hell no, that’s just too expensive” or some other reason for not doing it. That is probably more an indication that their imagination is too limited.

Mr Brown’s Letter

Media, Politics No Responses »

Nov 062009

If I were close to someone who had been killed in action in Afghanistan, which would I rather receive ? A handwritten letter in poor handwriting and numerous misspellings ? Or a carefully worded letter, computer printed with a signature at the bottom.

Obviously I would rather receive neither – I would rather than someone close to me were still alive. But given the choice between the two letters, I would rather receive the handwritten one with misspellings and poor handwriting. A properly crafted letter that is computer printed is far less personal, and the wording is likely to be very bland. It would also feel like it was a form letter sent to everyone.

As for the poor handwriting and misspellings, a sensible person would not draw attention to that. There are often reasons why someone has poor spelling – for instance dyslexia. And someone with poor eyesight who probably relatively rarely writes by hand is likely to have poor handwriting.

Silent Running: Electric and Hybrid Cars Too Quiet ?

General, Media 1 Response »

Nov 032009

You know I was going to jump up and down shouting I told you so … except I cannot find the post from ages ago where I pointed out that this might be a problem (extra points to anyone who finds the link!). The BBC has just had a story about the dangers to visually impaired people from “quiet cars” – hybrids and electric vehicles. Actually of course it is just about everyone who finds it helpful to hear cars coming – indeed I will listen to my iPod on “mono” in certain situations to ensure I get an early warning from the noise of approaching vehicles.

Whilst loud vehicles are an enormous pain and I certainly would not want to encourage their use. The person who invented car stereos loud enough to cause nearby buildings to shake – and yes they can get that loud – needs to be tied down and forced to listen to my choice of music for a few weeks. So called silent cars do also cause problems; in fact a certain amount of noise results from the tyres running along the road. We are used to relying on sound to assist us in locating moving vehicles; in some cases it is the only sense we can rely on.

Apparently Lotus engineers have come up with a nifty system that generates noise that varies according to the amount acceleration the driver is applying. Sorry guys, you’ve been sniffing petrol fumes too much. Whilst the driver may be impressed by the feedback he (or she) gets when they press the acceleration pedal, the rest of us are more interested in the speed of the vehicle. Sound effects for the driver are all very well (when played inside the car) but rather out of scope for this discussion.

It would not be difficult to make hybrid and electric cars generate a noise when they are moving nearly silently. And the most sensible thing to do is to standardise the noise generation before we end up with a confusing variety of different sounds and volumes. The simplest is to have a tone generated when a vehicle is moving that starts low in pitch at low speeds and rises in pitch as the speed increases. Think old-fashioned milk floats.

Battlestar Galactica on Blueray

Media No Responses »

Oct 312009

Well the story is fine, the cinematography as good as you would expect from a large budget show (although there’s a little too much digital noise in some of the darker scenes), the sound excellent. What’s not to like ?

The formatting of the BD disks themselves of course. Whilst the actual content is pretty good, the way that it has been put together sucks. You can tell those putting it together tried pretty hard to make the blueray experience feature filled, but they forgot the one real reason why people buy boxed sets. They buy them to watch the show.

And too much gets in the way of that :-

There’s an especially irritating piracy warning. If I dare to pirate the disks, the FBI will apparently use extraordinary rendition to kidnap me from the UK and fine me $250,000! If there is anything more irritating than those pointless anti-piracy messages, then it is an anti-piracy message that has not been “localised” – people get more than a little annoyed by US-orientated messages.
We get an annoying little message from the director about how good the disks are. This would be bad enough if it only appeared without our requesting it once, but it seems to show up every time you change the disc for the next one!
Similarly when you start playing an episode on a new disc, you get an annoying pop-up warning you that certain features will only work if you have a recent blueray player. It is the wrong place! If certain features won’t work it will be noticeable more in the menu than in the playback!

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